Armed with starry-eyed, pacifist idealism and a thirst for finding the truth, the Transcendentalists of the Era of Reform sought to reject the token values of society and to fulfill their potentials as reasonable, worthy individuals. They were an idealistic and refreshingly egalitarian group of intellectuals in a world of slavery and budding industrialism, embodying an odd mixture of praise for the individual and desire to unite. The concept of the individual was the supreme ideology as far as the Transcendentalists were concerned; they thought that in order to rise above the base and unenlightened society, individuals should seek their own truths, resisting the urge to conform to common perspectives. The faith in the individual even spread to the formation of new ideas about religion, proclaiming the divinity of the individual. The reform of religion, however, was secondary to the reform of society; the Transcendentalist drive to reform society, to transcend it, to perfect it, sparked a series of "utopias", communes designed to embody the goodness, equality, and freedom the Transcendentalists so admired.

François Marie Charles Fourier Suomi: François M...

Grenoble - ancien évêché - Joseph Fourier

Robert Owen memorial, Kensal Green Cemetery, Londo...

These individualists looked to communal living as a means to repudiate the class-conscious and unequal society of the mid-1800s. While they believed all the answers to be contained within the individual, the Transcendentalists saw that reforming all of society would require a group effort; however, their group effort, as shown in the Owenist New Harmony and the Fourier phalanxes, failed. The contradicting fundamental beliefs that formed the Transcendentalist communes during the mid-1800s were also the primary and unnecessary cause of their downfall.

American Transcendentalist utopias generally fell into one of two categories: either Owenism, a movement started by Robert Owen, who created the first non-religious socialist community, or Fourierism, a movement which also based communal living on non-religious principles, created by Charles Fourier. The goals of each...

More Literature Research Papers essays:

... and logic held above unquestionable faith. Although different religions do exist in Utopia , the people all meet in the same churches run by the same priests, and services accentuate the similarities between the religions. For example, if a religion requires a prayer that may be offensive to ...

... religion. Pure egalitarianism runs into additional problems due to an apparent conflict between liberty and equality. Upon Tocqueville's journey across America "nothing struck [him] more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. " From the abandonment of primogeniture, to the ...

... manifestation of the devil. Consequently, when the town's girls were dancing in the woods they automatically blamed it on the devil. This shows that all of the residents possess this fear of the devil whereby creating a mass relationship for hysteria to spread. The Puritan religion seeks ...

... chance to strengthen and grow. Human beings are fearful of what is foreign or unknown to them either to the eye or within the mind. When humans are wedded to notions of difference and locked in their own sense of righteousness and notions ...

... plan they were over heard by Ariel who foiled their plan by awaking the king and the nobles. In the end of the play the men were reprimanded by Prospero and then found the "real" meaning of freedom of speech . One thing that our society today ...

4 pages29Dec/20061.0

Students & Profs. say about us:

"Good news: you can turn to other's writing help. WriteWork has over 100,000 sample papers"